Saturday, June 28, 2008

And here's my son, Thomas, 3.25kg, 50cm, born at 10:45am on Thursday (26th), healthy and (subjectively) cute.
Everything went great (as "great" as giving birth can be, won't argue with women about that), mother is in good shape and feeling well too.
Such a tiny little thing to hold in one's arms, almost forgot how it is, even though our daughter Gaëlle is just (almost) 3.
So don't be surprised if I'm a bit "inactive" and slow to reply to emails and stuff, currently having higher priorities ;)

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

» webpin CLI 1.0.0

webpin 1.0.0 is available in the openSUSE:Tools build service repository.
The only change is that it supports searching for openSUSE 11.0 packages (and that there is an openSUSE 11.0 package of webpin).

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

» Translations for countdown

I'd need a few translations for the 11.0 release countdown picture so, please, if you can contribute in one of the languages below, send me an email or put the translation in a comment below.
"Out now!" or "Available now"! (or whatever is best suited in your respective language), in the following languages:
- greek (el)
- croatian (hr)
- hungarian (hu)
- norwegian (nb)
- dutch (nl)
- polish (pl)
- romanian (ro)
- russian (ru)
- swedish (sv)
Obviously, that's the text that will be displayed once 11.0 is available for download, and afterwards.
And, as you can imagine, it's urgent :)
Thanks!

Monday, June 16, 2008

As a comment to Adam Bien's "demise of POJOs", as his blog doesn't allow more then 1000 characters in comments :)
I have other gripes with EJB than their weight (or lack thereof). To me, as a developer of frameworks and more or less generic components used by many developer teams, the JEE spec lacks a great amount of stuff once you go beyond the usual business logic + some database type of application.
Clustering ? Not even mentioned in the JEE spec. Cluster membership (have a cluster node uniquely identify itself), sending messages to all cluster nodes (have to resort to proprietary replicated JMX), etc...
Execute initialization/warmup code at startup ? Still have to resort to the servlet trick, or use proprietary mechanisms.
AOP ? Dependency Injection ? only very lightly supported in EJB 3.0, clearly not sufficient for more complex approaches.
Security ? JAAS ? ouch.
To me EJB is a great facade technology for remoting, EJB 3 is a nice managed component model for applications where it fits... business logic, JDBC, web or Swing UI, but nothing more advanced (from a purely technical point of view) where you need a lot of flexibility or cluster awareness. And yes, while Spring doesn't help wrt clustering, it provides a much more flexible and fine-grained model to manage beans. I mean, this isn't theoretical or fanboyism, I clearly encounter situations where a fine-grained control is needed, every single day. So while EJB can be a good approach for business application level developers, especially when you need to fence them into a scarce technical frame, it just doesn't provide enough features nor flexibility for frameworks or components that need a fine grained control over lifecycle/deployment, cross-cutting concerns (security, audit logging, ...), clustering, etc.

Monday, June 02, 2008

» openSUSE Board Elections Committee

A week ago, AJannounced on the opensuse-project mailing-list that we (the board) have approved the proposal we've been working on since some time. It was heavily influenced by feedback we gathered from IRC meetings and the opensuse-project list (threads here and here).
One of the key items is that a separate group of people will organise the elections, instead of the board itself. The idea is to reduce chances of cheating and manipulating the process and/or the results (theoretical chances, as I don't see anyone on the board even remotely intending to do that, but it's a matter of trust and democratic processes).
We are thinking of a board election committee composed of 3 members, who would have the job of organising and running the board elections, from collecting people who want to apply for the board, selecting both a process and a piece of software to run the elections as well as announcing the results. To avoid reproducing the same potential chicken/egg issue as if the board was doing this, members of the election committee may not apply for being a board member.
So if you're interested in taking part into one of the most important processes of our community, please contact us at board@opensuse.org.